Self-driving cars are cool – there’s no denying it. But, there’s a lot of hard work and effort needed before they will be anywhere near perfect, and is that really even possible? Well, a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) seems to think they are making progress when it comes to creating reliable self-driving cars through the help of their Moral Machine.
The Moral Machine has been developed by MIT engineers as a way of putting the public in the shoes of a programmer who has the difficult task of training a self-driving car how to handle certain life-death situations that require some form of moral thinking. It’s based on the famous trolley scenario where a runaway trolley is shooting down a railway track heading towards 5 people that can not move out of the way. You are next to a lever that if pulled, will switch the train to a different track, avoiding the 5 people, but hitting one that is standing on the side track. What do you do? There is no simple answer really, but it comes down to which is the more ethical option: killing 5 people or killing 1.
In the Moral Machine simulation, the user is put into a variety of moral predicaments where they must choose what they feel is the most ethical option (i.e. hit and kill 2 people, or hit and kill 5 animals). There are a whole range of people including elderly people, criminals, pregnant women, and children in the simulation, and sometimes the decision is not that easy to make. You can also pass your scores along to MIT at the end if you want to and see how you compared against others. So, if you do have a few minutes spare, why not check it out and see how you do. But, even with all this data to hand self-driving cars will never be perfect, and at the end of the day, it’s still very much a machine capable of killing a person without any human input, and that is a slightly worrying thought.
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